Dan Sturges is a transport visionary. For twenty years he’s foreseen and been tackling some of the transport-related problems the rest of the world is only just starting to grapple with. Sturges isn’t anti-car. He is simply pro shaking up mobility full stop, and believes that far from just moving people in to electric cars, we need to introduce people to a variety of vehicles - ones that are the right size for each journey they make.

A couple of months back, I chatted to him over skype about his current thoughts on his company Intrago, the future of mobility, and what the auto industry is up to. You can see an edited highlight of that video below, and then after the jump I’ve pulled out and discussed what I think are the key points he made.

Right now, the vehicle revolution looks set to be electric, but very few people have driven an EV to date. So to dispel a few myths about electric vehicles being about as quick as a milkfloat, or as attractive as a noddy car, we though we'd use our recent experience in the Smith Electric / Ford Transit Connect BEV to tell you what driving an electric car (well, van-based car) of the future might be like.

Starting up

Getting in to Smith’s demonstrator Ford Transit Connect EV is just like stepping into a regular Transit Connect. It looks like any automatic transmission vehicle. There are two pedals and a centrally mounted gearshift, with park, drive and reverse ratios.
It’s when you turn the key in the ignition that things get different. Instead of the churn of a starter motor and the flare of revs as an internal combustion engine bursts into life, what you’re instead greeted with is a barely perceptible whining noise, as the car’s 12volt system powers up, and the diagnostics run a check on the traction batteries. Once that’s done and they’re powered up, you hear a ‘pop’ noise as the connectors kick in, signalling the vehicle’s ready.

Moving off

From there, it’s simply a matter of slipping the gearshift into drive, and then silently, eerily, moving away. The lack of sound is – quite unsurprisingly – the thing that takes most getting used to. If you’ve ever sat in a car being pushed or towed with its engine off, the first few yards you cover driving an EV will feel familiar. Your brain, used to the gentle rise of revs from an internal combustion engine, struggles to comprehend that you’re moving without sound. Video:

Accelerating and on the move

Moving away from rest is a doddle. Simply press the accelerator, as you would in an automatic car and the van hurries away from the line with no fuss. Electric motors produce nearly all of their torque from zero rpm, which means good acceleration at low speed, and instead of the rise and fall in acceleration rates (and engine noise) you’re used to from an internal combustion engine, there’s simply a constant, linear accelerative force – as if a giant elastic band has been attached to the front of the van, and is hauling you toward the horizon.

One thing that's worth noting is that you do become more aware of other vehicular noises - from the tyres, wind, and interior of the vehicle. We wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of work going into the next generation of electric vehicles to really try and muffle or eliminate some of this other ambient sound, as we suspect that if - say - the interior developed a creak or rattle in your electric car, it'd really draw attention to itself and prove to be much more noticeable and annoying than in today's internal combustion vehicles. Nontheless, the lack of motor noise makes this whole experience feel, as Vinay suggests from the back seat, “a little star trek” – the van has only one gear ratio, which means you just don’t feel the same sense of acceleration. So it comes as a surprise to look down and find you’re doing 60 miles per hour. This thing is not slow. Video:

Braking

The most noticable driving difference in the Transit Connect EV over a regular car or van is the regenerative braking system. Prius and other hybrid drivers will already be familiar with such systems, which capture energy when a vehicle is slowing down, and feed it back into the battery. The Transit Connect EV has the most aggressively set up type of this system I’ve yet driven – and if you’re clever and read the road ahead, it means you’ll rarely need to touch the brakes. Simply lift your foot off the accelerator, and the vehicle begins to slow – quite quickly – to the extent that, when exiting a motorway at 65mph, the van had brought itself to a stop at the end of the off-ramp, without me touching the brake pedal at all. Video:

Our view

If you’re British and of a certain age, your perception of what an electric vehicle will be like is probably rooted around the milk float – the ancient morning delivery vehicle with a top speed of around 15 miles per hour. Smith Electric, Ford’s partner on this project, actually used to build those vehicles as far back as 80 years ago, but the Transit Connect EV bears so little resemblance to such a device that the method of propulsion almost ought to be given a different name. Both are electric vehicles, but comparing the two is like comparing Issigonis’s original Mini with a contemporary Porsche.

The most complementary thing we can say about the Transit Connect BEV is that it drives at least as well as its internal combustion counterpart, and in many regards it’s better. It easily keeps up with traffic. The lack of drivetrain shunt, engine noise, and not needing to change gear significantly reduces the load on the driver – meaning they’re free to concentrate on the road. Smith report that fatigue and strain levels in drivers of its EVs are significantly lower than in equivalent internal combustion powered vehicles. Critically, in the small delivery vehicle market, this should lead to safer, more aware drivers, who have fewer accidents. The proof of that particular pudding will be in the eating, when these vehicles go on sale in the US next year. But Smith report that of the drivers on its existing fleets who’ve made the jump from gasoline to electric drive, not one now wants to switch back to an internal combustion engine. From a group of drivers who are notoriously hard to please, that’s the best endorsement going.

The Movement Design Bureau team visit Smith Electric's production facility in Washington, Tyne & Wear, UK on 17th August 2009. Thanks to Dan Jenkins and everyone at Smith for being so accommodating and patient. Disclosure: Ford is sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's design and research work in 2009

It’s been a long time coming, but be in no doubt that the electric vehicle (EV) revolution is finally upon us. What makes us so sure? We’ve seen Ford’s first EV coming down a production line, and actually driven it on public roads.

While
GM has long stolen headlines in the US with its Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid,
cross-town rival Ford now looks set to beat it to market with a humble Transit van.
It might not be Aptera-sexy, but its impact on the environment – especially in
cities – could be in a different league to the trailblazers currently in the market, like Tesla.

Whereas
most car drivers still worry about the range limitations inherent to electric vehicles,
with a van or small truck – where daily routes tend to be predictable, and well
under 100 miles a day in urban settings, ‘range anxiety’ for the driver
practically disappears. Ford’s move to make its first mass-market electric
vehicle a van, therefore seems smart – especially as many will go into big
fleets, where operators can closely monitor vehicles and provide detailed feedback
on the performance of what is still quite new technology.

First Ford Transit Connect BEV (here as Tourneo - a crew version) for the US, on the ramps in Smith factory

The
Transit Connect BEV as Ford calls it, goes on sale in North America in 2010, but the first vehicles to hit American shores are rolling down a production line right now
- in a factory in North-East England, where they’re built by Smith Electric
Vehicles. Earlier this week, Smith’s Dan Jenkins showed us the first Ford
Transit Tourneo Connect BEV on the production line floor, which you can see in this video below:

Smith
has a long history of building electric vehicles, with a number of big-brand
customers in Europe such as Sainsbury’s (supermarket), TNT (deliveries), and TK
Maxx (retail) already using its vehicles in their fleets. They’ve been converting Ford
vans for some years, so the official partnership between Smith and Ford that
was announced last year – which will ultimately see electric Transits being
built in a factory in Kansas City, seems logical.

The
real proof of the pudding is in the eating though, and having seen the first production vehicle on the factory floor (see video above), we then got to drive Smith’s demonstrator
prototype, fresh from a tour where it was shown to
people like Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. As you’ll see in our
video (below), from the back seat, the feeling of traveling at 50 miles per hour in a
vehicle with no engine noise, feels more than “a little star trek”. But the
real story is that, from behind the wheel, the Transit Connect BEV drives just
like a regular car or van, only one that’s much simpler to operate, and much quieter on the move. We've driven the future, and it's electric:

Check out more videos from the day we spent with Smith on our Blip TV channel - and watch this space for more blogs and videos on this subject, which we're following very closely. All Movement Design Bureau material is available for republication under a Sharealike Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Disclosure - Ford is sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's design and research work in 2009 - however we have an independent brief and say what we think. If you disagree, we want to hear from you. Thanks to all at Smith - and especially Dan Jenkins - for giving up their time to show us round the factory.

Fleet vehicle buyers can spend the time to understand the bottom line benefits - environmental and financial - for making the electric vehicle switch in a way that ordinary car buyers cannot always do, making fleet buyers able to switch to new electric vehicle options more easily than ordinary car drivers.

Our new project - Electric Delivery - seeks to understand the commercial electric vehicle market in real detail: over the next six months we will talk to vehicle manufacturers, fleet managers, drivers, customers, and everybody else involved in making real electric vehicles work.

That's for tomorrow. Electric Deliveryis about documenting the progress of the working electric vehicle today. White vans first.

See more of The Movement Design Bureau's coverage of future transport, strategy and vehicles - including several in depth interviews and analysis with Ford's top sustainability and design people, here.

Above: a uk Transit Connect in the pedestrianised zone in the centre of Kingston-Upon-Thames

I’ve spent much of the week chasing round after blokes wearing high-vis vests in South-West London. Why? It’s the attire of choice for what we colloquially term in Britain ‘white van man’ – the guys who drive delivery trucks and vans around our cities, day-in, day-out. I wanted to understand and film the life of a van driver, and his van, because earlier this week Ford announced the first of its four electric vehicles was going to be a small delivery van. And while this left some surprised (obviously, they were going to make an electric car, right?) I think it’s a smart move (see the video below) – and wanted to know if the guys who drive vans agreed.

The plan is to bring a new version of the Transit Connect we already have in Europe, to the US market for 2010, and offer a purely electric battery-powered version too. While it looks like the US will be first to receive the electric van, we think that the topic of delivery vans is truly relevant to cities all over the world. The boom in onlineshopping has seen their number increase dramatically in recent years, and the way vans are typically used is an ideal fit for the characteristics of an electric vehicle. Much more so than the typical family car, I’d venture.

Most vans live in cities. This means they’re subject to lots of stop-start traffic, and short journeys between drop-off points just a few miles apart (see the video below for more footage of vans in the city). This environment’s where an electric vehicle will tend to provide the greatest gains over a regular combustion engine - which is at its least efficient on short, cold, stop-start cycles. As mentioned, we’re conducting more in-depth research on this (more in a minute) but our, and Ford’s, hunch is the typical Transit Connect-type delivery van covers less than 100 miles each day. Most people’s concern about electric vehicles is to do with ‘range anxiety’ – or the “but what about when I need to drive 400 miles across the country in one go?” question. This is relevant for many car drivers, but a city delivery van makes huge sense as the market point at which to introduce an electric vehicle, because the nature of van-based deliveries in urban areas doesn’t require the infinitely extendable, on-the-go fill up capabilities (and range) that the current internal combustion engine, gasoline and fuel station combo offer.

Environmentally, electric vehicle in cities are advantageous because they eliminate tail-pipe pollution. The big deal here isn’t really carbon emissions and the climate change story, but the elimination of soot, particulate matter and NOx that the diesel vans emit, because these pollutants are thought to be one of the main causes of local respiratory diseases. And with city mayors around the globe taking the lead on cutting carbon emissions and getting tough with legislation, we’re already starting to see (and can envision much wider implementation of) central inner-city core areas becoming blanket emissions-free vehicle only zones. Are big-city shop owners going to need an electric, or hydrogen powered van to get deliveries to their stores in the not-too-distant future? We wouldn’t bet against it…

With many vans bought by fleet organisations (in London we reckon Virgin Media, Majestic Wine Warehouse, BT and Securicor run fleets of Transit Connects) – Ford gets the (useful) opportunity to closely monitor large numbers of these vehicles, getting real-world feed back easily and readily – much harder to do with individual car customers.

And we’re pleased to see that it’s Smith Electric Vehicles – a UK based firm - who’ll be doing the conversions for Ford. We mentioned them in our piece a couple of years back, about the opportunity we saw in a further electric delivery truck advantage – their (almost) silent running. Today, in cities like London, organisations like the big supermarkets – who want to make deliveries at night, can’t. Councils have to grant them special permits, and limit the number of night deliveries, because the noise disturbance to (sleeping) city residents caused by diesel tractor units, is too great. Eliminate this, and get a little inventive with the way goods are taken on and off the truck and into the store, and EVs could form the backbone of an entirely new nighttime delivery network. The benefit? Reducing congestion. Deliveries in the daytime, combined with the way our city centres have evolved, actually creates vast amounts of traffic congestion, because vans have to park in (and therefore) block traffic lanes to make drop offs.

So could electric vans underpin an entire new delivery network? It was an idea Florian Seidl - now a designer at Fiat, and I, explored last year, in a concept which you can see the results of below. We’ll revisit it as part of our ongoing research into the subject of electric vans, in the near future. For now, it looks like our hunch might have been right - electric vans are set to silently win the battle of the streets.

Above - Florian Seidl and Joseph Simpson's design for a new electric van-based delivery system - click for larger images... Below - Our vans photoset on flickr. We'll be adding to this over the coming weeks:Posted by Joseph Simpson on 13th February 2009